rarely used borzois or falcons for hunting, and was relatively uninterested in the strategy and the tactics of the chase. But she was an expert markswoman, and in two months at Peterhof: her summer es- tate, she shot sixty-eight wild ducks from her window. Often, an army of beaters would drive the animals from the nearby forest into a dearing, and Anna would pull up in a special carriage and shoot them all. Anisimov mentions that she might have had an "Amazon complex." Anna's favorite form of entertain- ment, however, was to arrange and re- arrange marriages, and it was this pen- chant that gave rise to the House of Ice. The winter of 1740 was the coldest in decades: barometers shattered, brandy froze indoors, birds fell from the sky like stones. That winter, one of Annà s servants, a middle-aged, hunchbacked Kalmyk woman known as Buzheninova, after the dish buzhenina (cold roast pork), confided to Anna, "Without a husband, my life is like a hard frost." The Empress was struck by the notion of marrying Bu- zheninova to one of her six jesters, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, who had been con- victed of apostasy for marrying an Italian commoner and converting from Russian Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Anna had commuted his sentence and dubbed him Prince Kvasnik, the imperial cupbearer of kvas (a beerlike beverage made from rye or barley). Kvasnik's other official du- ties included sitting on a nest of eggs in a reception room while clucking like a chicken. Anna's chamberlain was the one to suggest that the wedding festivities take place in a palace made of ice. Then Biron's archrival, a charismatic cabi- net minister named Artemy V olyn- sky-the protagonist of Ivan Lazhech- nikov's novel-organized a mass holiday in honor of Annà s birthday and name day, the anniversary of her accession to the throne, Shrovetide week, and the ratification of the Treaty of Belgrade, between Russia and the Ottoman Em- pire. The wedding of a Kalmyk and a Catholic convert was to represent Rus- siàs "total victory over all infidels." The whole celebration would culminate at the House of Ice. The couple made their entrance in an iron cage on the back of a real elephant, fol- . Russian ice festival took place on Yeltsin' s initiative, in Moscow in 1986. The directors of the Ice Studio, Valery Gromov, a former Navy officer, and Svetlana Mikheyeva, a former doctor, first became interested in ice sculpture in 1999, when they travelled to Japan as part of the Russian Presidential Management Training Initiative, and got stuck in an el- evator in Tokyo with one of Y eltsin' s ap- pointees-the chairman of the Associa- tion of Russian Snow, Ice, and Sand Sculptors. In 2002, they co-directed Pe- tersburg's first International Ice Sculp- ture Contest. (The Ukrainian team won, with a Trojan horse.) The next year, they founded the Ice Studio. In the summer, the Ice Studio builds sand sculptures; last June, two of the House of Ice sculp- tors collaborated on a twenty-foot sand Gulliver in Komarovo. Gromov and Mikheyeva had long dreamed of reconstructing Anna Ioan- novna's palace. They planned to hold weddings in their House of Ice: for the equivalent of around four hundred dol- lars, couples could marry there; for around four thousand they could spend their wedding night in the ice bed. City officials approved the proposal last November. In January, workers cut five hundred tons of ice from several nearby lakes and trans- ported it to Palace Square, between the Admiralty Fortress and the Winter Pal- ace. Twenty sculptors from Petersburg, Archangelsk, and V ologda spent three weeks cutting blocks of ice with chain saws, fusing them with water, spinning balustrades on electric lathes, smoothing the walls with clothes irons, and hand- carving the sculptures. They replicated all of the components in Krafft's description, including the bathhouse, but they re- placed the fire-spewing elephant with an elephant-shaped slide. The House of Ice opened in early February, not without controversy. Mi- kheyeva had wanted to hold weddings there on Valentine's Day, which com- memorates a Catholic saint. The editor of the newspaper Orthodox St. Petersburg said that the Ice Studio was "trying to rid- icule the Holy Mystery of matrimony, not in a church of God but in a transitory . , 1 " h Jester s pa ace; e characterized the en- tire tradition of 'Jest- ers' weddings" as a "conscious mockery of lowed by a three-hundred-person "eth- nographic parade" of "bridal couples." Lazhechnikov describes the parade- which he claims that his grandmother witnessed-in "The House of Ice": Os- tyaks riding on deer were "followed by Novgorodians on a pair of goats, Ukrai- nians on bulls, Petersburg Finns on don- keys, a Tatar with his T ataress, mounted on well-fed pigs, to demonstrate the con- quering of both nature and custom. Then there were red-haired Finns on miniature horses, Kamchadals riding dogs, Kalmyks on camels," as well as Belorussians and J aroslavians. Kvasnik and Buzheninova were trans- ferred from their cage to the House of Ice, where armed sentries forced them to remain until the next morning. They spent several hours running around, dancing, and, in Lazhechnikov's ren- dering, turning somersaults, beating each other, banging on the walls, and breaking all that could be broken. Fi- nally, they collapsed on the ice bed, where they were found the next morn- ing, close to death. Mter the festival, V olynsky remained in the Empress's good graces for a short time-until his valet turned over some compromising papers to Biron, and he was convicted of treason. In June, V olyn- skj s tongue and hand were cut o and he was beheaded, as was the architect Eropkin. In October, at the age of forty- seven, Anna died, of kidney failure. In November, the Biron family was ban- ished to Siberia. As for the House of Ice, it had melted in March-all except some large pieces of the walls, which were used for refrigeration in the imperial palace. W ith the arrival of spring in 1740, the short-lived tradition of ice ar- chitecture more or less disappeared from Russia. In the nineteenth century, ice cas- tles were built in Siberia, but the really spectacular work was being done else- where: North America, Finland, Japan, China. It wasn't until Boris Yeltsin, orig- inallya construction foreman in the Ural city of Sverdlovsk, came to Moscow, in the nineteen-eighties, that the Rus- sian ice renaissance began. The first all- . 46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 29, 2006 .